Two Turntables and a Microphone

{self}Know this. You hold power in your hands.{/self}

Have you ever been to a great concert? It’s a beautiful thing to hear each member of a band harness his or her respective instrument’s power and produce a song with wonderful harmony and rhythm.

On the other hand, have you ever seen a great DJ? It’s a completely different game. A DJ takes the content produced by others, adds some beats of his own and produces a curated, unique sound.

Some think DJing is not a skill, but they are wrong. It absolutely is a skill. It’s curation. And it’s a parallel to what gives the average man on the Internet power. DJs find songs and co-create something beautiful. This is what people can do on the Web too.

Like DJs who take their record collection and pick out the songs they want to focus on for that evening, a Web savvy individual can design a site that curates all the information around a particular subject matter and create a space for people to come to and find everything they need. You have “bands” like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and then you have “DJs” like The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post.

The Web savvy individual now has the same opportunity to publicly establish his or her own “brand” that recognized media personalities enjoy. When a larger audience starts reading a News Corp. author on RSS feeds rather than directly from a publication, the emphasis shifts from the publication to the author, creating one global media outlet with franchise personalities. It's the ultimate media meritocracy, and it kills the “record label.”

Of course, once a Webmaster breaks the strong association between the columnist and the publication, there is no motivation for the publisher to continue footing a paycheck. Are we heading toward an era where Dow Jones and The New York Times Company simply establish their own RSS of independent journalists who meet their brand of journalism? That’s a different article, but the discussion must be going on at those companies.

This article is about the power of average man through aggregation and curation. Anyone can harness the breadth and depth of the Internet to change the world.

Matt Drudge is the ultimate example of this. He produces minimal content on his own, but the service he provides for his users is invaluable. Someone can go to The Drudge Report with the understanding that the content is generally focused on politics, and through that one site catch up on all the news they need.

And the amazing thing is what Matt Drudge does is not really that difficult technically. Anyone can curate through a MySpace page, blog or buy a URL and create a website. That step is easy.

The skill is being the curator. Anyone can try to be a good DJ, but, just like any skill, the talent rises to the top. Finding that useful, engaging information is not easy.

Your curation cannot just be the act of culling every piece of information and pulling it all to one source. To be worthwhile, it has to be thoughtful and carefully selected with a purpose. Done properly it can be the power to unite a group to affect change. You can be the DJ of change. When you gather around socially and engage in community, you can change things.

You can get books published .

You can circumvent government dictatorships .

You can transform political discourse and get presidents impeached or elected .

This is an age where the pen or more specifically, the keyboard, is mightier than the sword, truly. Sharing across the globe is easy with dissemination of information like never before . Mobility is on the rise . Information and media lives in more places than ever before and anyone has the ability to harness it and change the world.

This is why you see old media getting so upset . Watching yourself gravitate toward irrelevance is not a fun proposition. However, it’s been said many times, and many a Darwinian casualty has experienced the ramifications of not following this little piece of advice: Adapt or die.

Now, you control your experience. You own your media and can shape it . If you don’t like something your outlet is doing, you can force change in real time. The situation a few months ago at Digg illustrates this perfectly. The users told the curators what they thought and the curators listened and acted…on the users’ behalf . This new experience empowers the audience to take an active role as “journalists” through their responses.

This is true democracy. This is the reason why you have to worry about net censorship and net neutrality . Because, as it stands, you have more power than you can even realize. Whether you are one person in an apartment or a massive global corporation, with the current media landscape the way it is, you have the power to get on a computer with Internet access, type on the keyboard and change the world. And that’s where it’s at .